12 or 20 (second series) questions with Daniel Tiffany

Daniel Tiffany is a poet and theorist based in Los Angeles and Berlin. He is the author of six collections of poetry from presses including Action Books, Noemi, and Omnidawn, along with the documentary projects of BLUNT RESEARCH GROUP, published in the Wesleyan Poetry Series. His latest volume, Cry Baby Mystic, was published by Parlor Press in 2021. Poems of his have appeared in journals such as the Paris Review, Poetry, Bomb, jubilat, Fence, and Lana Turner. In addition, five volumes of his scholarship have been published by presses such as Harvard, Johns Hopkins, and the University of Chicago, and he has translated texts by Greek, French, and Italian writers. He is a recipient of the Berlin Prize, awarded by the American Academy in Berlin. www.danieltiffany.com

1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?

Well, on a purely pragmatic level, the publication of my first book (a critical book on Ezra Pound published by Harvard University Press) got me tenure. I remember shouting for joy somewhere in a parking garage when I got the news that the book had been accepted. As for the question how my work at various stages compares (I’m speaking only about my poetry now), I’d say I couldn’t to speak to the quality of it over the years—that’s about readership, and authors are readers of their own work only in very odd ways, some reliable, some not. I do have my favorites, though, among my books. Some people say they can see, despite the range of approaches and forms, a continuity from the earliest to the latest. But I see changes as well—increasingly fewer words and forms which are at once constraining and magnetizing.

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?

I came to poetry because I wound up attending a poetry reading in high school, half stoned, by a guy named Morton Marcus (who died recently—and taught for years at Cabrillo College in California). I’d never heard anything like it, I felt like I was dreaming with my eyes open, sitting there in class. At the same time, I was a young actor and went off the following year to Juilliard (the Drama Division) in New York, where I continued to read and write some poetry on the side. Come to think of it, my involvement in theater as a kid certainly must have tuned my ear to poetry as a crucial filament in the imagined space of the theater. I don’t think most people realize that actors (and preachers)--after poets--are the most sensitive and engaged readers of poetry in our society (often more so than other writers), since their training and art requires them to literally embody poetry in the roles they play (at least in productions of texts written prior to the 20^th century). And their insights differ significantly from the kinds cultivated by poets. Though I haven’t been involved in theater in any capacity for decades, it has dawned on me from time to time that certain conditions of theater remain deeply embedded in my writing.

3 - How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Does your writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?

My poetry projects take shape pretty slowly, especially the one I’m fiddling with now, which has taken a long time to come into focus conceptually (and this project, more than any prior to it, has a strong conceptual aspect). I do lots of reading, listening, absorbing a gallery of voices—some poetry, some prose or fiction—which supplies the tonal palette for the book to be written. This gleaning period can last a year or more, but the writing, once I’m ready to go, can proceed rather quickly—though it can get hung up at times along the way. And to get into the space that each project requires, it’s crucial that I retreat—a luxury since my kids are grown now—into short periods of absolute privacy (a few days at a time) to settle into my brain and keep my bearings. There’s also lots of revision down the road, right up until the moment of publication.

4 - Where does a poem or work of prose usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the very beginning?

A new project starts for me with mood, a particular climate of personal and impersonal feelings; and that stage very quickly passes into reading and gathering a constellation of texts, each providing a note, a coloring, a distinct tonality, to be sampled into the whole. My collections of poetry are usually book-length projects, whether broken into poems (sometimes untitled or sharing the same title), or in my latest volume, Cry Baby Mystic, a book-length poem (composed in tiny stanzas).

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?

Yes, I love to read my poems aloud, though public readings can also sometimes be lonely or quietly turbulent in ways that linger sorely in the memory. What I love best is being inspired and energized by someone reading aloud before I stand up to read, which carries me forward like a wave. But sometimes I don’t quite know how to receive compliments after a reading. They make me worry about whether a poem could stand on its own for the solitary reader!

6 - Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?

There are indeed theoretical concerns that put pressure on the poetry I write, but I try to be cautious about drawing direct correspondences between what’s going on in my lives as a poet and a scholar. Also, there’s a lot of my critical writing out there (including the entry on “Lyric Poetry” in the Oxford Encyclopedia of Literature), and some readers will search around to draw their own conclusions. Nevertheless, because I developed a reputation as a theorist and scholar before I began publishing books of poetry, critics often felt compelled (in reviews of my early collections) to test out correspondences that they perceived between theory and practice in the volume they were reviewing. In reviews of later collections, however, those references to my scholarship have become sparser (which I’m glad to see), allowing the poems to wriggle free, without caption or credit.

At the same time, there are resonances between my poetry and my theoretical work, which I wouldn’t want to suppress. And I feel grateful whenever someone feels inclined to sound out those correspondences, with some degree of suspicion. People (readers) have noticed resonances between my thinking about vernacular languages, colliding levels of diction—one could even say translingualism—and the profusion of voices in my poetry. In several of my books, for example, I’ve fooled around with collages, or alloys, of archaism and other kinds of patois, starting with The Dandelion Clock in 2010 (Tinfish)—which anticipated Bergvall’s and Brolaski’s experiments with Middle English a bit later—and other more recent poems by Jos Charles and Pattie McCarthy.

Generally, I’d say there’s an abiding concern in all my work with models of expression in poetry, shared language, and community. On the other hand, the current project I’m working on (with BLUNT RESEARCH GROUP), Logophobe, could be described as hovering around the problem of inexpression, of incompetence, and linguistic vulnerability: facing (and cultivating) the stupidity of one’s own language—in part by sounding the stupidity of the idols—and inhabiting feelings of fear and dread about language.

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Does s/he even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?

While I don’t seem to have strong views about the writer’s role in society, I do think there are crucial forces today bringing new kinds of writers (and communities of writers) to public prominence, and that “churn” is indispensable to the vitality of the art. One lesson to be taken from this disclosure of new riches from new sources is that one generation, or community, must be prepared to step aside—to drop back into the shadows—in order to support the continuing vigor of verbal arts. This is not a position about politics, per se, but it has powerful political implications. In addition, poets have historically had a special role (in comparison with other sorts of writers) in maintaining a reflexive and sometimes experimental orientation to language. Poets are often the custodians—and interrogators—of language at a granular, and even molecular, level.

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?

As a poet, one rarely works with an editor who makes substantive suggestions, or even line edits. I wonder what that would be like—and how it might be justified. At the same time, when I read books of poetry, a little thought bubble often pops into my head: “This collection could use a good editor!”

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?

Take your last book, throw it in the drawer, and forget about it.

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to critical prose)? What do you see as the appeal?

Because I wound up writing both poetry and scholarly, or theoretical, work, I agonized for many years about the corrupting influence of one modality on the other, fearing especially that my scholarly work would paralyze my process as a poet and put language to sleep. Actually, as I’ve gotten older and glimpsed a bird’s-eye view of my work (at moments), I think it may be the scholarly side of my work that has suffered most profoundly from my erratic commitments as a poet. My concerns and priorities as a poet have sometimes skewed the integrity of thinking and argumentation. At the same time, though I still must segregate the two activities--I can’t immerse myself in a poetry project while writing serious criticism—I feel much less fearful of the reciprocal harm one might bring to the other. It is what it is; it’s my history, I can’t help it. Poetry is resilient.

11 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?

I’m not someone that writes every day—though I may be immersed on a regular basis in activities that a project requires: reading, research, wandering. I do like to hide away for days at a time when the work really gets going. My writing practice tends to follow a gradually intensifying arc: from distraction to speculation, to research and gathering, to increasing daily absorption in the writing process--which can occupy any period of the day or night--to revision (and more revision).

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Henry Wei Leung

Henry Wei Leung earned his BA in English at Stanford and his MFA in Fiction at the University of Michigan, then dropped out of a PhD program in Hawai'i. He is the author of Goddess of Democracy (Omnidawn, 2017), the end result of a Fulbright in Hong Kong during the Umbrella Movement. He is also the translator of Wawa's poems from the Chinese, including Pei Pei the Monkey King (Tinfish, 2016) and a tome-in-progress called Prelapsarian Bloom. Now a JD candidate at Berkeley Law, he was recently named a Fellow for the Salzburg Cutler Program in international law in D.C. He currently works as a judicial extern in federal court.

1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?

My first book coming out should've been the career-making moment. Instead, it made me confront my long unspoken disappointment with the twin industries of academia and literature. Goddess of Democracy took three years to write, edit, finish, and publish--the same three years it took for the activists and student leaders in the protests I was writing about to be prosecuted, jailed, barred from the legislature, exiled... and none of them will ever read these poems. So I changed course for a JD in law, and decided to apply all that I've learned about language and storytelling to a setting with more material consequences. My recent "work" is therefore very different, whether I'm working on a civil rights or securities case, whether the facts are petty and boring or outrageous and rile me up. The stakes of a poem are held in the next generation, the next century, in language itself. The stakes of legal writing are in a person's one day in court, in their chance to tell their story and set the record straight.

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?

There's no first or second or last. Fiction was all I knew as a kid because none of my teachers assigning Shakespeare, Blake, or even Langston Hughes had any idea what they were talking about--or really cared. And the library didn't have much poetry more recent than the Beats. It took a while for me to find poetry because it took a while for me to encounter poets.

3 - How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Does your writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?

The process is only ever consistent when it comes like a strike of lightning. As in "Disobedience," which seems to be the poem of mine that's quoted most often, and about which I never know how to answer questions. In those cases, the poem writes itself in a single draft, in a feverish focus. Sometimes I think the "practice" of writing is no more than that: to get your reflexes ready for when you hear the thunder coming.

4 - Where does a poem or work of prose usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the very beginning?

Usually a piece doesn't come together until I have the title. That makes me a project writer, I suppose. Same in my legal writing so far: I can't put the facts together in a sequence until I know what the case is about or what it should be about. No content without a meaningful form. No surprise without a structure.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?

I find readings unbearably redundant. Have you ever been to one where the vast majority of the audience were not other writers, editors, and friends or followers of the author? The first reading I ever gave in public was after I won a local poetry contest when I was seventeen. I was invited to read with half a dozen adults. At the end of it, each of the other readers was immediately clustered by a circle of their own people. It was like a private club, and I was the only stranger. Every other reading in the last fifteen years has felt about the same. The only difference is that I've made more friends, who then cluster around me afterward, which has never been the point for me. But I did read once at an independent film screening and panel discussion, which was a wildly different and fruitful encounter; poetry in that case became an unexpected part of the audience's evening. I felt that it came a little closer to being part of the world.

6 - Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?

Previously: democracy and addressing the other in the second-person. Now: justice. Because I can tell you what injustice is, in both structural and granular detail, but what justice actually is I honestly do not know.

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Does s/he even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?

My basic expectation is for the writer, by mastering language, to transcend language, and therefore be outside the larger culture, to belong to no time, to be the wilderness. And perhaps, then, to be in a position to give counsel to the times. To guide the species back to its humanity.

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?

Essential, but I try to avoid it.

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?

"What are the words you do not yet have? What do you need to say? What are the tyrannies you swallow day by day and attempt to make your own, until you will sicken and die of them, still in silence? Perhaps for some of you here today, I am the face of one of your fears. Because I am woman, because I am Black, because I am lesbian, because I am myself -- a Black woman warrior poet doing my work -- come to ask you, are you doing yours?"

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to translation to non-fiction)? What do you see as the appeal?

I don't believe in genres. That's a term for agents and markets. When we write, there are only forms or structures, and the appeal is simply what implement works best for the task at hand. Oliver de la Paz said that every book for him means starting over and re-learning poetry, because he has to abandon the form that carried the previous book. I agree with that. Translation is different, though. It feels more tangible, more like a craft with the hands, chiseling at something with a pre-determined form. It's also free of the usual pitfalls of solipsism.

11 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?

Most days I read on the commute to work and write on the commute home. Some days I catch my breath and see people's faces.

12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?

I get on with my life. Louise Gluck once went a decade without writing. So did Jack Gilbert. The life is a process of the writing. Recall Rilke's admonition to live forty years to write one good line.

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?

Angel's trumpets.

14 - David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?

I'm less interested in the school of thought that says beauty multiplies itself, and more interested in the school that says beauty comes out of the devastating moments of beauty's absence: i.e. beauty as emergent necessity, sui generis. In other words, I think books come from the failure of civilization to protect our imaginations; they come from life at its most abysmally ugly moments. I think books come from the failure of books.

15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?

Simone Weil, tremendously. The Bhagavad Gita. Rumi. And comic books, which I find to be both emptying and life-sustaining.

16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?

Cook a perfect cast iron ribeye without a thermometer. It's so simple but I can't get it right.

17 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?

I would've been a martial arts instructor. It was either stay and do that (or join the military for the cash), or apply for college.

18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?

Language is everything for a broke immigrant kid in a non-English-speaking household. I had to confront the world as an alien either through the body or through language. In other words, for me: either through martial arts or through literature. Literature seemed to take me down a deeper path at the time.

19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?

Albert Camus's The First Man (his last and unfinished). Steve Barron's DreamKeeper (2003, originally an ABC miniseries).

20 - What are you currently working on?

Drafting a legal order for something I'm not allowed to talk about. And a novel.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Leona Chen

Leona Chen is the firstborn of parents raised under martial law in Taiwan, and the great-granddaughter of the aboriginal Ketagalan tribe’s last standing chief. The making of her debut collection, Book of Cord (Tinfish Press), was a 20^th birthday gift to herself and to Taiwanese democracy. She is an undergraduate at Washington University in St. Louis.

1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?

Book of Cord is my very first collection. It has made me feel brave, especially considering I have never trusted that my art could be enough. It's strange that literature and lyric have so often been my salvation, but when it comes to becoming a "legitimate" writer, a published one, I still doubt that I'm worthy. I have been more confident in my lesser skills.

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?

There is more universality in poetry. The poem to begin all poetry for me was from Rilke's Book of Hours. (Nearby is the country they call life/You will know it by its seriousness/Give me your hand). I was eight. I wasn't reading Rilke, I was reading the diary of some fictional Jewish girl living in Austria during World War 2. It had been her brother's favorite poem. I was a literal reader, or perhaps not empathetic enough to identify with her at the time, but the poem changed me in some significant way. I remembered it for over a decade, until I was old enough to read the entire piece, properly. And it has continued to change me. I borrowed those lines in a poem to my own sister.

3 - How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Does your writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?

I did all of my work as a student, so I always had weekly deadlines. One would think working with assigned topics and time frames would be frustrating for a creative. But I liked the walls, the expectations. And I liked pretending not to understand them. We would be told to write about awkwardness, or ekphrastic poems from our museum, and I would somehow always turn in something off topic like, oops I wrote about being Asian American again.

4 - Where does a poem usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the very beginning?

I didn't realize I would be working on a book until I'd gone through semesters of poetry classes wanting only to write about the diasporic experience. And then I had to compile my works into a final portfolio during a docu-poetry class and I thought I might as well stop pretending I didn't have some ulterior agenda going on. It wasn't about writing a coherent collection. It was about having so much unresolved angst, so little closure about who I was that I literally could not focus on anything else until this book became a thing. And now that it is a thing, I've dredged up too much stuff to move on.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?

When I imagine my poems, I don't really envision a 5' girl with a Disney/Hollywood accent reading them. I sort of ruin my own artistic aesthetic. I would rather never, ever perform my work. Also, I'm shy.

6 - Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?

I worry a lot about appropriating generational, ancestral trauma in my work, especially as a young writer wanting to tackle identity or persona poetics. I never want to conflate personal suffering - lost love, broken relationships - with the real violence of colonization, genocide, oppression. I feel it is clumsy, unethical even, to exploit histories where poetic rhetoric fails. I think most teenage writers (and I was one until very, very recently) begin with a repertoire of poems about heartbreak and angst, and then we struggle to transition to other topics without clinging onto those visceral aches that first propelled us to write. And so part of growing up as a writer, I think, is becoming more sensitive to an embodied relationship with history, space, and time. I would be upset if I was thirty and still writing about boys who didn't text me back.

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Does s/he even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?

To speak truths, no matter how small they are. Especially as a minority writer, or a writer more sensitive to nuanced experiences and perspectives..

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?

I am lucky in that my editors, when I've had them, have been peers and professors who've treated my work with a great deal of kindness. Especially in introductory poetry classes, my lack of confidence meant that I would have been very easily discouraged from writing. I hope their generosity hasn't meant that I'm delusional about the quality of my work, but they've kept me trying and practicing, which is what matters, I think.

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?

"In good writing, you must kill all your darlings." Written on the syllabus of my first college poetry class.

10 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?

I'm still an undergraduate, so a lot of my writing happens in between other stuff - and very often during (the wrong) class. I've tried to develop a serious routine - something with a fancy voice recorder, or a schedule, or a Moleskine journal. I've tried sitting in very expensive cafes, or waking up with the sunrise. But pretty much every poem in this collection started off in the margins of Calculus problem sets or takeout menus at 3am. I am disciplined in most things - but not my writing.

11 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?

I had a professor, Gillian Parrish, who talked about training an ear for lyric and rhythm. And I think part of developing an instinct for what sounds good and feels right is sifting through as much content as possible. It's like those psychological crosswords where the first word you find is your deepest insecurity or whatever. Whenever I felt uninspired, I'd skim walls of text, relevant or not, and find words with resonance, anything that felt extraordinary. And then I'd sort of play around with the energy - words like ghost and bone, they have a gravity. But in pairings - silk ghost, brittle bone, the alchemy changes.

12 - What fragrance reminds you of home?

Sesame oil, saltwater, soy sauce.

13 - David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?

I’m an Economics major – allegedly. I think a lot of my work is influenced by pretending to be analytical but always finding a human, softer approach so much more intuitive and fulfilling. I became really creative trying to explain to interviewers why studying poetry made me a better data scientist. I wanted to do everything, and the connective tissue inevitably becomes apparent.

14 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?

I like variety. On any given day, because of the nature of my schoolwork (and not because I'm fantastically industrious), I bounce from econometrics analyses to sociological research to canonical poetry to really frothy chick lit. I can't say I enjoy it all equally, but it absolutely informs my work.

15 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?

Talk to strangers who've read the book - if there are any. I would hope so.

16 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?

I would have liked to be more of a writer. Occupation TBD.

17 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?

I write, and do "something else." I would probably be much better at one of these if I stopped worrying about being accused of not being practical enough.

18 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?

Marilyn Chin, Revenge of the Mooncake Vixens. Biting and clever in a way I am not. 

I will not embarrass myself by revealing the last great film, because I am a huge fan of exhausted and admittedly terrible mega-franchise films.

19 - What are you currently working on?

Graduating from university.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;